you have a bad connection
by smileyfacebabe
Summary: sequel to "call me beep me if you wanna reach me". Allison apologizes for Scott's endless streams of text and Isaac barters information on her brother and his not-yet-boyfriend in exchange for the knowledge that he isn't as lame and lonely as Ethan and Aiden (or something). Cora is reluctantly fond or them all. Sterek.


Author's Note: This is a sequel to _call me beep me if you wanna reach me_, which I literally wrote like eight hours ago. Shout out to lightsage10, who suggested a sequel where Isaac and Allison got in on the texting and before I knew it the idea had me by the throat. I couldn't find a smooth way to merge into the next section I wanna write, where I bring in Peter and maybe the twins, but I'll probably write that later. (Probably not the twins. I only really like Ethan and Cora really has no reason at all to like and/or text either of them, no matter how cute Ethan and Danny are. But definitely Peter.)

Disclaimer: I don't own anything, but I wish I had an actual video of Stiles and Derek like the one below. It would make all bad days good, I swear.

EDIT: I went over this chapter and decided it could be improved, so I improved it. Should be continuing this tomorrow, or at least starting at continuing it. I have to memorize a poem, so don't hold me to that or anything.

* * *

Cora wasn't entirely sure how it happened, but the long story short was her phone became some sort of terrible CW drama show. The stupid thing never shut up, its little _incoming text_ chime going off almost every hour, and therefore it was almost always on its last leg, battery wise. It got her into more trouble than she could properly explain at school and more and more often her friends thought that the people texting her were using code or playing some kind of demented extended role-playing game.

It was awful, in the best way possible.

She didn't hear a lot about what was happening in Beacon Hills. It seemed to be a group effort to keep her out of the loop, though Stiles had explained, through a series of texts at four am that got sloppier and sloppier the longer they stayed up, that if she just asked what was happening they'd tell her. But Cora liked the distance between herself and the things that hurt them. She liked that when they texted they could pretend for a little while that there wasn't a million things out for their throats. On her weakest days she liked to pretend that the text messages would be what her life would be like if the fire hadn't happened; Stiles and Derek circling each other while everyone else watched and took bets. She knew her mother would have loved Scott, though Stiles probably would have been too loud and abrasive for her taste, but Cora was nearly positive that she would have come around and loved Stiles, if only because Derek did. Laura would have loved Stiles before Derek even had a chance to meet him, and she would have been the biggest supporter in the Hale household for the Derek&Stiles cause.

_**if derek n stiles don't kiss soon i will cry i swear**_

_Two days until Thanksgiving_, she reminded Scott, gleefully. _Also kissing doesn't count as getting together._

_**wait are we goin by kissing or dating bc i thought it was kissing**_

Cora glanced up at her teacher, but his back was turned. She bit her lip and swiped her thumb across the screen as fast as she could, bored with history class. _I thought we were using dating as the end game_, she replied.

_**fck i change my bet then**_

_You can't change your bet, that's cheating. Don't be such a wuss, alpha boy. _

_**lydia said the endgame was fucking but i really dont wanna know about stiles n derek havin sex**_

"Ms. Hale."

"Oh fuck," she whispered. She glanced up and found her teacher glaring at her from the front of the room. Her friend and lab partner gave her a sympathetic look as the teacher marched forward, hand held out. "If you'll just hand me your phone, you can have it back after detention today."

_Fuck I hate you I've got detention again_, she swiped as quickly as she could. She had just managed to send the message and then shut down her phone when the teacher reached her desk and with a sigh she handed it over. Her foster mother was going to be so pissed, but her foster father was going to laugh himself sick. When she received her phone back, four hours later, after both detention and soccer practice, she had three new messages.

**Don't be a child; the bet is won by whoever was closest when Stiles and Derek have sex.**

_**o fuck im sorry shit**_

** Hi this is Allison. Apparently Scott got you in trouble? I can't understand what he's saying, but he seems really apologetic about the mess. But I'm sorry about him. Our new chemistry teacher doesn't care if we text, so he never puts his phone down. I guess you're the one he's always texting?**

Cora would deny grinning at the new number she could add in her phone, not that anyone would likely every ask her. But she would deny it anyway, on the off chance that they would ask about her reaction to Allison Argent texting her for something the girl's ex-boyfriend did.

_Gimmie a picture of Allison for my contacts,_ she texted to Stiles before she answered anyone else. Then she answered each text in the order they arrived in, kicking her legs higher and higher as she walked home.

_Fucking works just as easily for me as dating. _She told Lydia frankly._ Derek seems to fall into bed pretty easily, if your English teacher is any indication._

_ It's okay, Scott. I don't know why the hell the guy was so pissed, anyway; it's the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, it's not like anyone's paying attention to what he's saying anyway._

_ Hi Allison _

At dinner her phone chimed, earning her a frown from her foster mother, Josie, and a loud snort from her foster father, Mark.

"Any new exciting changes in the bet," her foster father asked, grinning. He pointedly ignored his wife's frown, leaning forward when Cora rolled her eyes.

"Scott's about to lose," she said. She grimaced immediately after, shrugging. "Or at least I think so? All he said today is that if they don't kiss soon he's going to go crazy. Then we argued about the terms of the bet and at what stage do we consider Stiles and Derek together enough to call a winner."

"Oh? What stage is that?"

Cora looked at the eight year old kid sitting across from her and flushed pink. "I plead the fifth," she said, much to her foster family's amusement. Her foster father was still snickering when she fled the table and fished her phone out of her jacket pocket, stumbling up the stairs to her room with her backpack open over one shoulder.

This is from last week, when Allison put on Isaac's ridiculous scarf and took Starbucks selfies with me. In my defense, I hadn't slept in two days.

Cora laughed and opened the picture, choking a little. She hadn't really had the time to meet Allison when she was in Beacon Hills, but the girl in the picture certainly wasn't the girl she vaguely remembered. She remembered a stern faced superhero figure who had swung in with her hunter's bow and saved them, the girl's mouth in a hard line and a shadow in her eyes. This girl was wearing a scarf and cocking her shoulders dramatically, her lips pouted out as she batted her eyelashes at the camera. This girl looked, despite the deep purple bags under her eyes, like someone who would be fun and wild, who would giggle in class when you rolled your eyes at the teacher's back. She looked like someone Cora would have loved to be friends with, if the fire hadn't happened.

She saved the picture to her phone and made it Allison's new contact. Then she texted Stiles back, flopping sideways on her bed and grinning a little bit.

_Allison was Green Arrow, right?_

Yeah. I'm still trying to get her to agree to the costume for Halloween next year. If we live that long.

_Please be Green Arrow for next Halloween, _she texted Allison, when her math homework became too tedious. She was ignoring the last part of Stiles' text, partially because it was morbid was mostly because it was part of their mostly-unspoken agreement.

**You're terrible. I call Valentine's Day on the bet.**

Scott was still sulking on Black Friday, swearing up and down that if he had _known_ the condition was sex he would have bet later when she received a text message from an unknown number. The Beacon Hills pack was kind of running out of members to bug her, so she guessed it was Peter.

She was wrong. It was Isaac.

my girlfriend and best friend/alpha keep texting you and its making me jealous please text me more than them so they can suffer

_I require one silly selfie in return for this plan to make your girlfriend and alpha/best friend jealous,_ she informed him regally.

how about no silly selfie and instead I supply you with a constant update of your brother and his not-yet-boyfriend?

_You've got yourself a deal._

Two weeks later, after constant updates that mostly included the phrases like scott is still sulking and oh god theyre terrible I want to pinch their cheeks theyve turned me into that old aunt that scares children make them stop and of course fuck it I call graduation at this rate Cora got another detention for her phone's endless buzzing. There were only two more weeks of school before Christmas, so she didn't really mind, but it was still pretty annoying. Their first soccer game was in two days and she was tying her cleats for practice when her phone chimed in with a text message. She'd only just gotten it back from her English teacher and hadn't yet scrolled through the messages she'd missed while it was confiscated. She opened the latest message anyway, ignoring the rest, grinning at the picture of Isaac with an elf's hat on that she had gotten from Derek, only to find that it was a video. The caption read im going to barf. She clicked it immediately, figuring her coach wasn't there yet anyway, so it wouldn't matter if she was sitting on her phone or not.

The video started with the camera pointed at the terrible yellow floral print couch in Derek's apartment where Derek was sitting, his head tipped to the side. After a few seconds of her brother grinning at something out of the reach of the camera Stiles walked into the scene on his hands, wearing a grey long sleeved shirt that looked suspiciously like Derek's, the material draped down over his face and exposing his stomach. Cora sputtered out a laugh as she watched Stiles wobble hand-walk over to the arm of the couch, where he bumped, butt first, into the piece of furniture. There was a moment where he teetered, like he was going to fall back the way he had come, but then he pitched, long awkward giraffe legs first, over the arm of the couch and into Derek's lap. Derek laughed, his hand coming up to fist in the collar of what Cora thought might be his own shirt, and she watched as her brother hauled the other boy upright. He stopped pulling once Stiles was sitting on the arm of the couch, his legs sprawled across Derek's lap, but then Derek's spare hand came up, quietly circling Stile's bare ankle.

She made a face at the screen of her phone, utterly amazed at the pair of them and their ridiculous behavior. It was like watching two paradise birds in the wild trying to impress each other or something equally as terrible and fascinating. She watched on, pulling the phone closer to her face, nose almost touching the screen. She knocked the volume up to its highest setting as well, thankful that she had done so because after a second of the pair grinning at each other in a sickening fashion Stiles spoke.

"Tada," Stiles said, grinning from ear to ear. He held his arms up and Derek laughed, louder than before. Her brother's face was scrunched up as he laughed, which was an expression Cora had never seen on Derek's adult face. She had seen the expression on his face when he was much, much younger, she was sure, but she didn't remember it much. Derek's knuckles then dragged along Stiles' jaw, her brother's fingers still fisted in the boy's shirt as they swayed toward each other, inch by grudging inch. The person taking the video, who had to be Isaac, gagged softly and then it abruptly cut off.

_I'm going to win this bet_, she texted everyone individually. Then she rocked out onto the soccer field before her coach, who had somehow appeared on the field when she was watching the video without her noticing, could get pissed. She was still smiling in a sickening fashion at the adorable nature of her brother and his not-yet-boyfriend (thank you Isaac for that term) even after the practice was well underway, because how could you look at those two and not feel your stomach contract with second-hand butterflies. She would put good money on Chris Argent not even being able to resist Derek and Stiles and their terrible not-PDA.

**I did the math,** Lydia responded promptly, though she didn't see the message until practice was over. **I'm never wrong**.

_i h8 u all_, Scott insisted. Then he spent all night texting her pictures of Kitty and her new mouse toy, because Scott had the attention span of a child and that cat literally had everyone in Beacon Hills pack wrapped around her little skinny tail.

Cora counted it as a good day.


End file.
